Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific Reading History and Trauma in Contemporary Fiction

In Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific, Susan Y. Najita proposes that the traumatic history of contact and colonization has become a crucial means by which indigenous peoples of Oceania are reclaiming their cultures, languages, ways of knowing, and political independence. In particular, she examines how contemporary writers from Hawai‘i, Samoa, and Aotearoa/New Zealand remember, re-tell, and deploy this violent history in their work. As Pacific peoples negotiate their paths towards sovereignty and chart their postcolonial futures, these writers play an invaluable role in invoking and commenting upon the various uses of the histories of colonial resistance, allowing themselves and their readers to imagine new futures by exorcising the past. Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific is a valuable addition to the fields of Pacific and Postcolonial Studies and also contributes to struggles for cultural decolonization in Oceania: contemporary writers’ critical engagement with colonialism and indigenous culture, Najita argues, provides a powerful tool for navigating a decolonized future.

Introduction: toward a decolonizing reading praxis, 1 Trauma and the construction of race in John Dominis Holt’s Waimea Summer 2 Recounting the past, telling new futures: Albert Wendt’s Leaves of the Banyan Tree and the “tropical” cure 3 “Fostering” a new vision of Maori community: trauma, history,and genealogy in Keri Hulme’s Th e Bone People 4 “Talking in circles”: disrupting the logic of property in Gary Pak’s The Watcher of Waipuna 5 Making Pakeha history: familial resemblances in Jane Campion’s The Piano, Epilogue

Susan Y. Najita is an Assistant Professor in English and Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies in the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.